Bury Me Standing Page 6

  Sometimes one mistakes girls for grown women because they have children. Here one was reminded that these mothers were children themselves when they started to have them. (Dritta’s beloved collection of plastic dolls, whose tiny outfits she occasionally slung in with the rest of the washing, should have been a clue.) But among the Gypsies teenage pregnancy wasn’t like teenage pregnancy in the West. Rather it was expected and desired, and it happened within the context of a large group whose members were poised to carry out their supporting roles.

  Jeta’s sister Xhemile—Mimi, married to Gimi—that summer became, at thirty, a grandmother. Jeta and the boria and I were invited to inspect her. Before we crossed Kinostudio, Jeta had asked me if by any chance I was menstruating; if so, no visiting the ten-day-old baby. This was Dritta’s reason for not coming along. They took precautions against pollution very seriously—for a menstruating woman was mahrime (though I suspect Dritta wasn’t much interested in someone else’s new baby anyway). The girl and the baby were camping out in Mimi’s parents’ house, while the grandparents, the puri daj and puro dad, stayed for the duration at Gimi’s. It was common among Gypsies that three generations would help each other out in this way.

  The two tiny rooms were feverishly hot: they had a fire going in the middle of July, and dark-red fabric tacked over all the windows. How scandalized these women would have been by the English couple next door to me at home, who left their bundled baby out in the garden in really cold weather, “to make her hardy.” The young mother, a sullen and anemic-looking girl of fourteen, sat quietly on a bed across the room, waiting with both feet on the floor, in case Mimi called for her. She would feed the baby and then go back to the cot and demurely sit, as if she had nothing to do with the fuss in the corner. And she hadn’t, not much. Her job was feeding, and recuperation.

  Mimi as a matter of course took over the care of the infant, of the washing and elaborate swaddling. Her mother, the puri daj whose house this was, could also have shown the girl how to take care of the baby. Mimi’s mother was just fifty, but she was old: tired, hunched, and desiccated (puri daj means “old mother”). She preferred to leave the lessons to capable Mimi, and to sit out with the old men, smoking. (Only old women had the right to smoke, and they took a lot of pleasure in it, after years and years as cooks and cleaners and food-finders and mothers.) The puri daj kept her pipe and tobacco in her bra, now that she didn’t have to concern herself with the household bank.

  For the new mother there was a lot to learn. Baby’s bath was followed by lengthy rubbings in home-brewed unguents and sprinklings of a saffron-yellow, curiously acrid powder. Then the infant was wrapped in a muslin envelope, so tightly that she could not move her arms and legs; the whole parcel, which was called the kopanec, was then fastened with pins and talismans to ward off “evil eyes.” Mimi pulled a thread from the red scarf I wore—red is the color of good health and happiness—and tucked it into the envelope. Jeta supplied a handful of new lek notes and in they went.

  The young mother couldn’t much enjoy this confinement (she, like her baby, was off-limits for forty days). But she had a lot of support; she didn’t really need to grow up. So long as a young bori was sufficiently submissive, and did all her chores, there was no reason for her to become an adult in any sense but the bodily one.

  Babies were adored. They offered the opposite of mahrime—they purified. For example, a woman was not allowed to walk in front of an older man; it was considered disrespectful to the point of contamination. But with a babe in arms you could walk where you pleased. Babies received constant and careful attention: they were wrapped and unwrapped and washed and dusted and oiled and wrapped back up again so much that, it seemed to me, they never got any peace. But once they were walking they became the responsibility of older kids, and they became part of the crowd scene, unspecified.

  Gypsies were rough with their children (not their babies); or so I felt. They were always shooing them away, yelling at them, and smacking them, and the children didn’t appear to be much bothered by any of it. It wasn’t cruel or unusual; it wasn’t frightening. Even play was rough, such as Jeta’s constant yanking and tweaking of all the little boys’ penises. They simply had a different style, and mostly it was okay: the kids were tougher than ours too, they had to be (o chavorro na biandola dandencar, the saying goes—“the child is not born with teeth”), and there was no shortage of love and attention and assurance of membership in the great Gypsy congregation.

  At Dritta’s mother’s, however, something else was at work. Jeta wasn’t just being a snob when she spoke ill of the Kabudji. They, or this family, lived by a different standard, or without one, and so they were a threat to the rest. On Dritta’s part it was pure delinquency, for she knew better: she didn’t allow her own children to witness this scene and would never have behaved this way in Jeta’s courtyard. I wondered why she let me see her like this. To show her independence, I suppose; to mock and to challenge anything I might take for universal and had earnestly recorded under “boria life” in my notebook. Her spirit came most of all from the fact that, unlike everyone besides O Babo (Pop—that is, Bexhet) and the children, Dritta was truly happy: she loved her man, she was a sister to her two sons, and she coasted above the demands and the remorseless vigilance that so often felled the two younger boria. In fact both of the other two were prettier than Dritta, but they didn’t know it and therefore neither did anyone else. Dritta was pleased with herself—wasn’t I pleased with her too? she seemed always to be asking, proudly grabbing at her own pony buttocks, not really interested in the confirmation. Dritta’s free time was often spent in the company of her own face. She had a much-prized mirror, hardly bigger than a compact and set in a ring of pink plastic petals.

  One morning at around five, Dritta in clogs banged over to the couch where I slept with little Mario. Not minding if we watched but paying us no attention, she went to work. Out from under us came her private cigar box, a treasury of single earrings, gum-machine bracelets, and bobby pins, a few grubby lipsticks, curlers, ribbons, eye kohl, thread, a tin of powdered henna, a photograph of a famous Turkish singer clipped from a magazine, and, her deepest secret, a small jar of skin-whitening paste. Dritta set the fashion trends, and without her resources in paint—for she was a typical big sister in her rigorous refusal to lend anything—the other girls did their best to keep up.

  Courtyard life was not fun, really, for any of them. They were indentured servants, stuck there, hardly allowed out, and with no place of their own inside (a drawer here, a stowed box there). Jeta was their boss, but Bexhet was their cross. They never so much as looked his way. This seemed, when sides had subtly to be taken, out of deference to Jeta, but it was also modesty, or anyway came in its guise. It was unseemly for a young wife to have much to do with her sastro, or father-in-law, in whose house she had to live; even to look directly into his eyes might imply impropriety—which naturally would have been shame and endless trouble for the girl only, whose fault it would by definition be.

  On rare occasions when there was no work to be done, Lela and Viollca would go into one of their rooms and blockade the door. They’d crank up the disco music on Nuzi’s blaster and have their own little dancing party. All over Eastern Europe girls still mostly danced together and not with men, but in the Duka household even this was not really allowed. A couple of times I was dragged into this all-girl club and made to boogy American-style, which produced great hoots and yelps (and within no time they could both do the hustle). Lela showed me her stilettos, old but unused, with smooth vinyl soles and metal heels like umbrella tips. After I had admired them she wrapped them back up in rags and hid them in a suitcase, pushed far under the bed. She was of course not allowed to wear these shoes but derived illicit pleasure from having them stowed in their hiding place.

  Normally so inert, in her own room Viollca was witty. The injustices of Dritta were a rich theme. She’d stomp her tiny feet in a mock tantrum, green eyes flashing. And then she woul
d do a perfectly exaggerated impression of Dritta, her butt caught in the door.

  After one such session there was a commotion in the room which I was baffled by—as if a bat had flown through and only I had missed it. The girls’ horror came from the discovery that Bexhet was on the premises. These young mothers lunged simultaneously to muffle the music box and ricocheting off each other flew to the bed, where they sat primly, hands in their laps, heads down, and holding their breath until his voice could no longer be heard.

  Those two worked pretty much in tandem: it was a natural form of protection (against Dritta, against loneliness). They wore dresses made from the same bolt of bright-yellow flowered material, whereas Dritta had made hers in red. It was the same pattern, both off the back of Beno’s Stanbuli truck; there wasn’t much choice in Albania, but the difference in color was significant, a demarcation which underlined Dritta’s far greater glamour.

  The rancor among the boria was a good work-aid. Each shredded shirt and towel was wrung within an inch of its life, practically dry, and, all along the four permanently stretched clotheslines, the rags were arranged, as artfully as possible, transforming the courtyard into a pleasing labyrinth of dripping kelims and clothes (underwear, and women’s kit in general, was tucked away, hidden under others or placed out of the likely sight-path of men).

  By seven or so the children were up and, like the hens and the puppies and Papín the goose, in danger of entering the main room and waking O Babo. It was the job of the boria to prevent this. They continually waved their rags and brooms and hissed at the animals; the children were silenced with fat slices of the hot brown bread thickly spread with chunky fig jam.

  The boria hauled logs and built a new fire, this one to be good and hot for Jeta’s return from market. The girls might prepare mariki, a sweet, layered, pizza-shaped pastry made from flour, powdered milk, sugar, and lard, whenever all of these ingredients happened to be available. But Jeta was the senior cook and the only shopper. Jeta alone handled the sheep, ripping off the skin with her hands if the butcher had neglected to perform this service. She alone chopped the meat into small pieces with her special cleaver.

  The longest part of the preparation was given over to more obsessive washing, this time of the meat. Jeta soaked and scrubbed that hacked-up mutton just as the younger women scrubbed blue jeans. Every once in a while she would yell out for pani nevi!—fresh water!—and the old would be poured out, marking the start of another round of scrubbing. All of these steps were complicated and protracted by the superstitions that had to be observed along the way. (Jeta spat on her broom. Why? Because she had swept under my feet. If I do not, she continued, seeing the first answer had not got through, your children will remain bald all their lives, stupid.)

  Hosing down the courtyard was a good job: animals and children scattered satisfyingly when the tubfuls of spent suds reclaimed the yard, the littlest one, Spiuni, jogging unsteadily away and shrieking happily through his tears as the water caught his heels. Everything had to be washed: the ground, the steps, the walls. Inside the houses too.

  Nobody, and certainly not the women, considered it remotely unfair that they did all the work. In addition to their regular tasks, all through the day they had to fit in those that the men continually made for them—for example, by using the floor as an ashtray. Nor in this closed world did they feel themselves to be victims. Quite the opposite: they had the comfort of having a clear role in a world of unemployment without end. It was the men, jobless and bored, who looked the worse off. This, I would find, was the norm among Roma everywhere—in Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and even among the refugees from these places, stockpiled and snoozing in the train stations of Poland, on hold, while their women and children went out to beg. The disparity between the women and the men was much greater among the Roma than among the gadje, and in Albania it could not, I didn’t think, be explained away by Islam.

  They called themselves Muslim but the designation had a peculiar local significance. For one thing, after Albania’s own “cultural revolution” in 1967, religion was vigorously outlawed in a way that it hadn’t been in the rest of the region, where during most of the communist period religion was quietly tolerated. When I first asked if they were Muslims, Dritta turned to Nicu and asked: “What are we?” None of them had been in a mosque; no one prayed; there was no Koran on the premises. The men were circumcised, but there was no rush about it. Normally the operation took place when boys were about twelve, or just before puberty, though at fifty, I heard, O Babo was intact.

  One dawn I was awoken by a mass visit from the boys: Mario, Walther, Spiuni, and a wild-eyed Djivan all scrambled into my bed as if for protection, perhaps thinking that as a guest whose wishes were never denied I could keep them there indefinitely. What were they so afraid of? Next door there were terrible child-screams. Elvis, Djivan’s best friend, had gone under the knife.

  It is commonly said that Gypsies are irreligious, adopting the going faith as it suits them, in the hopes of avoiding persecution and possibly of reaping whatever benefits membership might bring. This is true. For one thing, they have often been made to listen to sermons from outside the church. But the deeper reason is that among themselves they have no need of the religions of other nations. It was hard to say exactly what it meant to the Gypsies of Kinostudio to be Muslims, as they claimed. Their women were chaste and wore long skirts, but this was the code of “decent” Gypsies everywhere.

  One of the reasons I wanted to go to Albania was to see how, or if, isolation distinguished the Roma here from their brethren on the outside. In matters of belief, at least, they were just like some Gypsies I knew in New Jersey. Whatever it had once been, Albania was not now a religious culture. It was a superstitious one, for Gypsies anyway, and their spiritual life consisted of a mixture of animism, Deism, fear of ghostly ancestors, and imported religion—which is what Islam was. It is clear from the fact that personal responsibility is an unknown cultural value here that formal religion, and especially monotheism, has made no impact. The absence of formal religion was significant, though, for what has flourished in its place is a powerful sense of tribe.

  But the Gypsies do have fervently held beliefs. These come from the group, and not from an unseen power, and they are as strictly and unquestioningly honored as those of the most zealous fundamentalist. These beliefs are the tightly woven taboos and forms which guard against contamination—of the group, the person, the reputation. They constitute Romipen—“Gypsyhood”—and they are the key to the unusual ability of Gypsies everywhere to endure persecution and drastic change of many kinds and remain Rom. Relations between gadje and Gypsies are highly regulated and restricted, as are relations between Gypsy men and women—and the burden for keeping such customs falls mainly on the women. The parts of the body are symbolically cordoned off from each other; washing and language have a rich symbolic value that goes far beyond getting out the dirt and getting the salt passed, and these codes exist among Gypsies from Tirana to Tyneside to Tulsa.

  Lela and Viollca had the largest number of jobs and all the worst ones, and so I was sorry when I became one of their chores. They washed me every day, inside one of their rooms. Just as I was barred from doing any of the housework, I was not allowed to wash myself. They saw themselves not only as responsible for me as their guest, but responsible for and uniquely equipped to combat Albanian germs. There was no point in protesting.

  As they did for the children, and for themselves in the secrecy of first dawn, they boiled water, and one poured from a can while the other lathered me up and down. They were efficient and sometimes rough in their scrubbing; frowning with concentration they ignored my whine when they got soap in my eyes. They showed nothing other than their usual desire to do a thorough job.

  After I had got to know them, though, we had a lot of laughs, and both girls opened up. They were fascinated by my body, which, apart from being made up of the same basic female components and being about the same color
, was totally unlike theirs. In common with most Gypsy women the boria were short—around five feet—and they had almost no indentation from armpit to thigh. They were narrow-hipped as boys, small-breasted and short in the legs. Their feet were ridiculously small. Both girls were unexpectedly hairy—unexpectedly, I suppose, according to the child analogue they presented.

  It was my breasts that really intrigued them, though, as if they were boys experiencing their first close-up viewing. Without hesitation, they moved straight in to inspect. They poked and cautiously squeezed, and (sensing this might be going too far) very briefly they pinched. What were they doing? Did they think mine might even feel different from theirs?

  The touching wasn’t remotely sexual. It was part of a general stocktaking of everything about me that was different from them. Fascination and disbelief: they unself-consciously yanked their own breasts out of the tops of their dresses, and presented them as proof of my freakishness. These women were twelve and thirteen years younger than me, but never having worn bras and having breast-fed their sons for years, their breasts hung in yamlike triangular flaps, with slightly discolored tips for nipples. They were shyly earthbound, more tuber than sexual characteristic, strange and beautiful. The girls seemed to have stopped developing—rounding and blooming—before full womanhood, and then, still childlike and not fully realized, had begun their decline. Old girls: that’s what the naked boria looked like.

  Despite the inordinate amount of lather on the Duka premises, the children always looked like urchins. They started out clean but, like all kids who are allowed to play, they soon got dirty. Among many Gypsies the appearance of dirtiness was emphasized by the fact that their clothes, especially those of the more active children, were in shreds. For some reason Gypsies never mended; this was the case everywhere.